J.W.Anderson / Resort 2013

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Sometimes it’s not all that helpful to ask designers where they started with a collection. For one thing, the influences are often so disparate the connections don’t make a lot of sense to a laywoman. For another, if the influences really show, then perhaps they’re too much anyway. And then again, to be perfectly honest, who wants to wear a “reference”? In resort, especially, all most women are looking for are clever, sharp purchases, things which will spark up a wardrobe, yet fit in with what’s already there.

All these thoughts crowd in simultaneously as Jonathan Anderson, the eponymous author of J.W. Anderson, talks about the clothes he’s designed for late fall through to early spring, when resort pieces are in stores.

He was thinking about seeing multidenominational churchgoing women in their Sunday best on Kingsland Road in Hackney, where he (and 99 percent of London’s designers) live and work. He was thinking about women who wore “conceptual” Japanese design in the period when yoga became fashionable (that Zen, looking–East period, circa 1989–95). He’d been studying the great couturiers of the twenties: Worth, Paquin, and Patou. And, believe it or not, the Queen—Her Majesty, in her full-skirted, tiny-waisted funeral dress, mourning her father, just before her own coronation 60 years ago.

Well, you wouldn’t think it to look at the clothes, would you? Essentially—and refreshingly—what J.W. Anderson’s about doesn’t need to be freighted with ponderous intellectual cargo. He’s a designer who can nail an item—often many at once—that explodes with desirability, because it’s simple to wear, yet weird or quirky enough to feel well ahead of the ordinary. In this collection, those pieces would be the mid-length, flounced, wraparound skirts; the turtleneck, long-sleeved shirts; the gathered A-line blancmange-pink neoprene skirt, and his kilts. Now, too, there’s tailoring to excite another sort of woman—a great pinstripe pantsuit, worn over a black turtleneck.

There is a knack there, and a growing confidence, based on Anderson’s ambition to grow a brand. This season, he’s making steps towards becoming a multidimensional entity by dropping in accessories you can’t help staring at: enamel chain-link bracelets, crystal clip earrings, the black triangle headscarf reiterated in every photo in his lookbook. Young as he is, all these points are being noted, and avidly bought, by stores in Asia, America, and Europe. Make no mistake: J.W. Anderson is a British 2012 name to watch.